Time and again, George W. Bush's White House constructed and occupied its own alternate realities to suit its political needs.

Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Then "Mission Accomplished" and, for nearly four years, the insurgency was "in its last throes." Having declared that his team was fully prepared beforehand, Bush praised them after Hurricane Katrina for going a "heckuva job." He insisted repeatedly that we don't torture. It was an official administration position that tax cuts increased tax revenues, and that the economy was strong.

The decisions based on these non-realities were, not surprisingly, among the most disastrous of the Bush era. And all along, Bush was aided and abetted by a mainstream press corps that got accustomed to presenting "both sides of the story" rather than differentiating fact from fiction -- or what might be called truth from lies. Now a large fraction of the United States seems to occupy its own reality, even served by its own news outlets.

Why do I bring this up again? Because it's anything but ancient history. This denial of reality continues to infect our political discourse over the darkest of all the Bush legacies: The policy of treating detainees with deliberate cruelty, and torturing them. It is objective fact that the Bush administration consciously adopted tactics that are not just morally reprehensible and flatly illegal, but which experts says don't produce reliable intelligence -- just coerced confessions.

The argument in defense of the administration, made primarily by those who were complicit, is that it wasn't torture and it worked. But an increasingly critical mass of investigative reporting, supported by the release of key legal documents, has made it quite clear -- at least to those of us in what a Bush aide famously and contemptuously referred to as the "reality-based community" -- that those arguments are spurious.

Nevertheless, as unsupported by reality as those claims are, they will continue to be effective with at least some the public -- and the traditional media will continue to depict this as a story with two sides -- until or unless some sort of trusted, exhaustive and official investigation takes place, rendering an authoritative verdict on what happened, why, who was responsible, and what lessons we should learn.

Mark Danner made this case brilliantly (and at length) in his second New York Review of Books essay about the International Committee of the Red Cross report on 14 detainees held at the CIA's secret prison, which he both described and Web-published.

The Bush administration's counter-narrative, championed most assertively by vice president Dick Cheney, is that if it hadn't been for the "enhanced interrogation" of terror suspects, we would have been attacked again. But as Danner puts it: "Cheney's story is made not of facts but of the myths that replace them when facts remain secret."

Danner writes: "The only way to defuse the political volatility of torture and to remove it from the center of the 'politics of fear' is to replace its lingering mystique, owed mostly to secrecy, with authoritative and convincing information about how it was really used and what it really achieved. That this has not yet happened is the reason why, despite the innumerable reports and studies and revelations that have given us a rich and vivid picture of the Bush administration's policies of torture, we as a society have barely advanced along this path. We have not so far managed, despite all the investigations, to produce a bipartisan, broadly credible, and politically decisive effort, and pronounce authoritatively on whether or not these activities accomplished anything at all in their stated and still asserted purpose: to protect the security interests of the country.

"This cannot be accomplished through the press; for the same institutional limitations that lead journalists to keep repeating Bush and Cheney's insistence about the 'legality' of torture make it impossible for the press alone, no matter how persuasive the leaks it brings to the public, to make a politically decisive judgment on the value of torture.... What is needed is ... a broadly persuasive judgment, delivered by people who can look at all the evidence, however highly classified, and can claim bipartisan respect on the order of the Watergate Select Committee or the 9/11 Commission, on whether or not torture made Americans safer."

The Bush apologists think their best argument for torture is the case of Abu Zubaida, who they insist provided information under duress that prevented further attacks. And compared to the possibly hundreds of arguably completely innocent detainees turned in to American authorities for bounties and routinely beaten, sometimes to death, at the military prison in Bagram, Afghanistan, they may have point.

Yet ever since Ron Suskind came out with his book, The One Percent Doctrine, in June 2006, there's been persuasive evidence that almost all the administration's claims about Zubaida were wrong -- and that intelligence officials mischaracterized his value so Bush wouldn't lose face.

Now Scott Shane writes in Saturday's New York Times that the Bush administration's decision to ratchet up the brutality inflicted upon Zubaida, including repeated waterboarding, came "despite the belief of interrogators that the prisoner had already told them all he knew, according to former intelligence officials and a footnote in a newly released legal memorandum.

"The escalation to especially brutal interrogation tactics against the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, including confining him in boxes and slamming him against the wall, was ordered by officials at C.I.A. headquarters based on a highly inflated assessment of his importance, interviews and a review of newly released documents show...

"[S]enior agency officials, still persuaded, as they had told President George W. Bush and his staff, that he was an important Qaeda leader, insisted that he must know more.

"'You get a ton of information, but headquarters says, "There must be more,"' recalled one intelligence officer who was involved in the case. As described in the footnote to the memo, the use of repeated waterboarding against Abu Zubaydah was ordered 'at the direction of C.I.A. headquarters,' and officials were dispatched from headquarters 'to watch the last waterboard session.'...

"'He pleaded for his life,' the official said. 'But he gave up no new information. He had no more information to give.'...

"Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said."

But none of this matters to the defenders of torture.

Former Bush administration officials Michael Hayden and Michael B. Mukasey wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Friday with the spurious claim that Zubaida "was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh, another of the planners of Sept. 11, who in turn disclosed information which -- when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydah -- helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists, and the disruption of follow-on plots aimed at both Europe and the U.S."

This although, as I've written previously, Bin al Shibh was captured almost half a year after Zubaida was, and Suskind has reported that the key information about his location came not from Zubaida but from an al-Jazeera reporter.

And here, via Real Clear Politics, is Hayden on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, sticking to his guns: "In September 2006, President Bush gave a speech on the Abu Zubaydah case. He pointed out that he -- Zubaydah gave us nominal information, probably more valuable than he thought. He clammed up. The decision was made to use techniques.

"After that decision was made and the techniques were used, he gave up more valuable information, including the information that led to the arrest of Ramzi Binalshibh. After the New York Times story yesterday, I called a few friends to make sure my memory was correct, and I guess, to quote somebody from your profession, we stand by our story.

"The critical information we got from Abu Zubaydah came after we began the EITs -- the enhanced interrogation techniques."

Wallace: "Not before."

Hayden: "No."

Danner's argument about the need for "a broadly persuasive judgment" is compelling, and well worth reading. I would simply add that we need a lot more disclosure before such a judgment can be reached. In fact, over at NiemanWatchdog.org, where I am deputy editor, we are today kicking off a series of articles calling attention to all the things we still need to know about torture and other abuses committed after 9/11. We chose that focus because we think that when you think about how much remains hidden, how many issues are still unresolved, how many injustices have never been redressed, and how little accountability there has been, it's hard to make the argument that we're ready to move on.

Meanwhile, the memos I wrote about on Friday continue to disgorge new information and generate debate. And it seems that President Obama, who said in a statement that those who followed the legal advice in the memos won't be prosecuted, doesn't want to see anyone prosecuted at all.

Scott Shane reports this morning in the New York Times: "C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.

"The C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, according to a 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum....

"The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks....

"The fact that waterboarding was repeated so many times may raise questions about its effectiveness, as well as about assertions by Bush administration officials that their methods were used under strict guidelines....

"The new information on the number of waterboarding episodes came out over the weekend when a number of bloggers, including Marcy Wheeler of the blog emptywheel, discovered it in the May 30, 2005, memo.

"The sentences in the memo containing that information appear to have been redacted from some copies but are visible in others. Initial news reports about the memos in The New York Times and other publications did not include the numbers."

Sarah Gantz and Ben Meyerson write in the Los Angeles Times: "The conclusion in recently released Justice Department memos that CIA interrogation techniques would not cause prolonged mental harm is disputed by some doctors and psychologists, who say that the mental damage incurred from the practices is significant and undeniable."

No kidding. See, for instance, this report from Physicians for Human Rights.

The Associated Press reports: "An Austrian newspaper quotes the U.N.'s top torture investigator as saying President Barack Obama's decision not to prosecute CIA operatives who used questionable interrogation practices violates international law.

"Manfred Nowak is quoted in Der Standard as saying the United States has committed itself under the U.N. Convention against Torture to make torture a crime and to prosecute those suspected of engaging in it."

Nevertheless, R. Jeffrey Smith writes in The Washington Post: "The Obama administration opposes any effort to prosecute those in the Justice Department who drafted legal memos authorizing harsh interrogations at secret CIA prisons, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said yesterday....

"Emanuel's dismissal of the idea went beyond Obama's pledge not to prosecute CIA officers who acted on the Justice Department's legal advice."

The New York Times editorial board writes: "Until Americans and their leaders fully understand the rules the Bush administration concocted to justify such abuses — and who set the rules and who approved them — there is no hope of fixing a profoundly broken system of justice and ensuring that that these acts are never repeated.

"The abuses and the dangers do not end with the torture memos. Americans still know far too little about President Bush’s decision to illegally eavesdrop on Americans — a program that has since been given legal cover by the Congress."

Obama "has an obligation to pursue what is clear evidence of a government policy sanctioning the torture and abuse of prisoners — in violation of international law and the Constitution.

"That investigation should start with the lawyers who wrote these sickening memos."

Timothy Rutten writes in his Los Angeles Times column: "The president is whistling past the graveyard... when he insists that this is "a time for reflection, not retribution." Without facts, reflection is little more than daydreaming. That's why Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) is right to call for a truth commission that can render an accurate historical accounting of the executive branch's shameful conduct over the last seven years.

"A truth commission is particularly important because of the public rhetoric of former Bush administration officials -- the very ones who pushed so hard behind closed doors for permission to torture and who have argued so strenuously that the legal memos ought to remain secret.

"These officials, foremost among them former Vice President Dick Cheney, have not simply argued that releasing the memos and renouncing the kind of interrogation they sanctioned is bad national security policy or legally mistaken. Instead, they've gone well beyond that and actually insisted that torture 'worked.'"

And oh boy! Cheney will be on Fox News with Sean Hannity tonight.

Quick Takes

By Dan Froomkin12:42 PM ET, 04/20/2009

Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein writes in his SpyTalk column that "Rep. Jane Harman, the California Democrat with a longtime involvement in intelligence issues, was overheard on [a court-ordered] NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington." And it gets better. Stein reports that a Justice Department probe was dropped after then-attorney general Alberto Gonzales intervened, because he "wanted Harman to be able to help defend the administration's warrantless wiretapping program."

Bob Egelko writes in the San Francisco Chronicle: "A San Francisco federal judge rejected on Friday the Obama administration's attempt to derail a challenge to former President George W. Bush's electronic surveillance program by withholding a critical wiretap document."

Carl Hulse writes in the New York Times: "President Obama is running into stiff Congressional resistance to his plans to raise money for his ambitious agenda, and the resulting hole in the budget is threatening a major health care overhaul and other policy initiatives. The administration’s central revenue proposal — limiting the value of affluent Americans’ itemized deductions, including the one for charitable giving — fell flat in Congress, leaving the White House, at least for now, without $318 billion that it wants to set aside to help cover uninsured Americans. At the same time, lawmakers of both parties have warned against moving too quickly on a plan to auction carbon emission permits to produce more than $600 billion."

Michael A. Fletcher writes in The Washington Post: "President Obama plans to convene his Cabinet for the first time today, and he will order its members to identify a combined $100 million in budget cuts over the next 90 days, according to a senior administration official. Although the budget cuts would amount to a minuscule portion of federal spending, they are intended to signal the president's determination to cut spending and reform government, the official said."

Peter Wallsten and Faye Fiore write in the Los Angeles that the media's "glimpses into the Obama household are far from spontaneous. Instead, they are part of a careful strategy that has helped bolster the new president's popularity and political clout -- even as he promotes some economic policies, such as bailouts for banks and automakers, that lack broad appeal."

Ashley Parker writes in the New York Times about Mike Kelleher, the director of the White House Office of Correspondence. "He chooses 10 letters, which are slipped into a purple folder and put in the daily briefing book that is delivered to President Obama at the White House residence... 'We pick messages that are compelling, things people say that, when you read it, you get a chill,' said Mr. Kelleher, 47. 'I send him letters that are uncomfortable messages.'"

Ana Marie Cox writes in a Washington Post opinion piece that the White House beat should no longer be considered prestigious.

John Cook blogs for Gawker that Obama is now doomed. Why? Because ABC News political pundit Mark Halperin now thinks Obama is "dominating." Cook writes that "as David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager who is known to concern himself with real things in the actual world as opposed to the contours of Mark Halperin's ego, used to say on the trail: 'If Politico and Halperin say we're winning, we're losing.'"

The Obama Doctrine

By Dan Froomkin12:15 PM ET, 04/20/2009

Can you lead without being a jerk? Can you advance your nation's interests without being a bully? Can you strengthen your hand by reaching out to your enemies? Can you claim success without a trophy? Can your actions speak louder than your words?

Asked to describe the "Obama Doctrine" at a news conference yesterday at the end of the summit of the hemisphere's leaders in Trinidad and Tobago, President Obama responded with a fascinating disquisition, well worth close examination.

"[T]here are a couple of principles that I've tried to apply across the board," he said. "Number one, that the United States remains the most powerful, wealthiest nation on Earth, but we're only one nation, and that the problems that we confront, whether it's drug cartels, climate change, terrorism, you name it, can't be solved just by one country. And I think if you start with that approach, then you are inclined to listen and not just talk.

"And so in all these meetings what I've said is, we have some very clear ideas in terms of where the international community should be moving; we have some very specific national interests, starting with safety and security that we have to attend to; but we recognize that other countries have good ideas, too, and we want to hear them....

"Number two, I think that -- I feel very strongly that when we are at our best, the United States represents a set of universal values and ideals -- the idea of democratic practices, the idea of freedom of speech and religion, the idea of a civil society where people are free to pursue their dreams and not be imposed upon constantly by their government. So we've got a set of ideas that I think have broad applicability. But what I also believe is that other countries have different cultures, different perspectives, and are coming out of different histories, and that we do our best to promote our ideals and our values by our example.

"And so if we are practicing what we preach and if we occasionally confess to having strayed from our values and our ideals, that strengthens our hand; that allows us to speak with greater moral force and clarity around these issues."

"[A]s a consequence of listening, believing that there aren't junior partners and senior partners in the international stage, I don't think that we suddenly transform every foreign policy item that's on the agenda. I know that in each of these meetings the question has been, well, did you get something specific? What happened here? What happened there?

"Countries are going to have interests, and changes in foreign policy approaches by my administration aren't suddenly going to make all those interests that may diverge from ours disappear. What it does mean, though, is, at the margins, they are more likely to want to cooperate than not cooperate. It means that where there is resistance to a particular set of policies that we're pursuing, that resistance may turn out just to be based on old preconceptions or ideological dogmas that, when they're cleared away, it turns out that we can actually solve a problem."

Asked what he'd learned from listening at this summit, Obama replied: "One thing that I thought was interesting -- and I knew this in a more abstract way but it was interesting in very specific terms -- hearing from these leaders who when they spoke about Cuba talked very specifically about the thousands of doctors from Cuba that are dispersed all throughout the region, and upon which many of these countries heavily depend. And it's a reminder for us in the United States that if our only interaction with many of these countries is drug interdiction, if our only interaction is military, then we may not be developing the connections that can, over time, increase our influence and have -- have a beneficial effect when we need to try to move policies that are of concern to us forward in the region.

"And I think that's why it's so important that in our interactions not just here in the hemisphere but around the world, that we recognize that our military power is just one arm of our power, and that we have to use our diplomatic and development aid in more intelligent ways so that people can see very practical, concrete improvements in the lives of ordinary persons as a consequence of U.S. foreign policy."

And asked if his friendly interactions with incendiary leftist leader Hugo Chavez of Venezuela (who, among other things, gave Obama a book) might be perceived domestically as "being soft," Obama replied: "I think it was a nice gesture to give me a book; I'm a reader. And you're right, we had this debate throughout the campaign, and the whole notion was, is that somehow if we showed courtesy or opened up dialogue with governments that had previously been hostile to us, that that somehow would be a sign of weakness. The American people didn't buy it. And there's a good reason the American people didn't buy it -- because it doesn't make sense."

Via the U.S. News Political Bulletin: "ABC World News reported that the 'picture of the President smiling and chatting' with Chavez, 'who famously called President George W. Bush "the devil," created something of a backlash.'..

"On the CBS Evening News, Jeff Greenfield commented on criticism of the President's outreach to Chavez, saying, 'There is fallout from those people who already regard Obama as anything from a socialist to a fascist to a dangerously weak president. I'm talking about people on the right. If it doesn't spread beyond that, you're going to have the same situation where about 30% of the country really regards him negatively but the rest says "so far so good."'